- If John Talabot has been Hivern Disc's flagship artist until now, fellow Barcelonan Pional (Miguel Barros) is doing just as much to define the Catalan label's sound. Barros, recording as Alt Fenster, was actually the first artist to release a proper single on the label—"Clipee," a thundering mass of disco strings and epic techno thrills, which featured great remixes from John Talabot and D.A.R.Y.L.—and he adopted the name Pional for last year's A Moot Point EP, which balanced slow, ecstatic disco with clean-lined Detroit homage.
"We've Been Waiting for You" sounds like some magical combination of Joakim and Still Going, with crudely cut drum breaks, overdriven piano house chords and '60s choruses. It's those vocals that really drive it, taking an earthy funk groove and sending it skyward. I can never help but hear rainbows when I listen to John Talabot, and this song has the same effect, with harmonies and chord changes that blow the spectrum wide open. It never goes over the top, though, imbued with a restraint that suits its middling tempo.
Gavin Russom's remix preserves little more than the vocals, swapping out the drums and keys for brittle machine rhythms and acid squelch; what's striking is how faithful he remains to the spirit of the original, despite the extent of the remodel. The remix from Blue Daisy (London's Kwesi Darko) slows the tempo to 96 BPM, and it fills the spaces between the beats with half-remembered fragments of the original—strings, keys, whooshing cymbals and voices spun like dubbed-out pinwheels. Somewhere between dub techno and anti-gravity disco, it's a wonderful addition to the slim canon of "dance" tracks at that tempo. It has the motion of deep-water spelunking, and it's bathed in a comparably aquatic glow.
Tracklist A We Have Been Waiting For You
B1 We Have Been Waiting For You (Gavin Russom Remix)
B2 We Have Been Waiting For You (Blue Daisy Remix)